Shawshank Wine

I have a thing for beverages. Two weeks ago I wrote about beer. Last week espresso/coffee. This week. Wine. Next week. H2O. Maybe I am called to the beverage business. And here I am just writing and wasting my time. I won't even tell you how much time I dedicated to researching espresso machines this week.
     
After getting jacked on espresso last Friday, I headed to a local tasting room for California wines here in Lancaster. The night before I had been watching the local public access channel (I have Basic Cable so my options for TV are limited) and there was a winemaker being interviewed.   

I was thinking that it was another local vineyard trying to convince people that its wines were on par with Napa and Sonoma California. Although I am hardly a sommelier, I know this much about wine: There is no substitute for the warm and dry by day and cool by night geography of good wines. It is not even debatable. Or maybe it is. There is a lot of PR and prissy posturing in wine. 

What is debatable is whether the increase in quality is worth the exponential increase in price. Paying 90% more for a 10% quality gain is not usually financially-wise. Craft Beer scales better with the cost-quality variable. I will pay 2X for a beer that has a better taste and twice the ABV. I see the poor suckers walking out of the beer distributor with their 30 pack of nothing but water, bubbles and alcohol, and know that they are going to probably drink the whole case over the weekend, searching for something that they can't find in a beer.      

Pennsylvania's climate is just not good for excellent winemaking. Apparently, the summer heat, night and day, causes the grapes to continue to grow and become sweeter than they should be. Wine, like beer, should have a sweetness-acidic balance. 

European grapes are temperamental and don't do well with the extreme cold and extreme heat of Pa. And when it is hot here, it is 24-7 and grape goes hard towards sugar.  Go figure anything European being temperamental.  

I was surprised to hear that the winemaker, although local to Lancaster, owns a vineyard out in wine country California. I then thought that she and her husband must have made a lot of money somewhere else than wine to pull that purchase off. It is not often that Lancastrians would have that much money to be a player in these ranks. On par with The Beverly Hillbillies. 

As I queried the server at the tasting room, my suspicions were confirmed. They had made a lot of cash in a distribution business (food I think) and had parlayed the dollars from that business to the wine gig. On Wednesday, I was hanging out with a couple who had previously attended a function where the couple spoke and served their wines. The husband apparently commented that "The wine business is a good way to make a small fortune." Then he ruefully added, "from a large one." 

On Friday, I spent most of the afternoon hanging out alone with the server talking about the ins-and-outs of wine and learning some new things. It is fun to grasp new information and ideas. God has created an interesting world full of diversity and wonder. The chart above shows a wine map of sorts where the key attributes, like a compass, define a wine's location taste-wise. 

The server was really cool and we had a conversation about a lot more than wine. At some point, we chatted about our favorite films and I mentioned that Shawshank Redemption was one of mine. As a side note, which I didn't tell the server, I had not watched it for years because of some intensely personal reasons that I don't wish to talk about and permitting the past to stay in the past.

I watched it though on Tuesday night and was reminded of the prison the main character was jailed in for a crime that he didn't commit. In a real sense, he had to wait and work, like one does when making wine. He could only control what he did and he encountered much injustice. When the time came for him to make his break, one that he had planned and prepared for 19 lost years, he didn't look back. He became a vintage man in the process of prison.  

Loved this quote from a conversation between Andy (the unjustly imprisoned man) and Morgan Freeman's character Red. 

ANDY: You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?
RED: No.
ANDY: They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.

Over time, the acidic adversity of negative experiences fade from the taste of our recollections. Or should. We can only escape the prison of the past by forgetting the details but remembering what we learned. Watching the film again was good closure for me.